Hey there Trailers community members!
Our little group has over 300 members now; plenty of folks watching it to make a meta/discussion thread worth while.
So who am I, and who are you?
I’m a middle aged film nerd with a background in technology who really appreciates the art form of a well-crafted trailer. Always did. That, and I’m simultaneously frustrated by their existential relationship to commercialism and advertising. There’s a blurry line between this kind of content that effectively functions as “novel, entertaining news” vs “look at this new thing to buy”.
Back in the 1990s, if you were an American with basic cable service, the E! cable network had a 30-minute weekly show called Coming Attractions that showed nothing but upcoming movie trailers for all kinds of movies, all different studios. While it wasn’t perfect, it was a great venue for getting that content (and let’s be clear: ads) in front the very rarest audience: people who actually WANTED to see it.
And that’s basically why I wanted to create this community. The velocity of global film production has exploded. There’s so much interesting stuff out there to watch! Yet, at the same time, the notification pipeline for getting the word out about these films has completely broken down. Every studio has their own website, their own social media vectors, their own streaming services and YouTube feeds. And I genuinely don’t care about the vast majority of the content those sources generate. I don’t want to see clips or interviews or behind-the-scenes peeks for everything - jettison the filler, just show me the trailers.
And that’s what this community is meant to be: a distillation of hundreds of media sources, just pulling out the stuff that I wanted. And if I’m sorting through it all for my own satisfaction, I might as well share it with others. And I love that Lemmy has community level RSS feeds. Interoperability is sexy.
I’ll save the discussion of my methodology and experimentation with automation for a future community post, but just know that the link aggregation is mostly a manual process at the moment, but one that I’m eager to make more efficient as time goes on.
So anyway, enough about me. Who are you?? Introduce yourself!
Hello @neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone,
I wanted to ask you a question about this community: is it still about video games as well? I had a look at the latest posts, and most of them seem to be around movies and shows (which is fine), so I was curious.
Hi and welcome!
Yeah, games are still in-scope for community content. I’m the one doing most of the content creation/curation here, so I’m the one deciding what specific trailers (games, tv, and movies) make the cut.
I’ll freely admit that I hold a game trailer to a pretty high standard. Pure gameplay with quick cuts to show different levels and mechanics doesn’t make compelling entertainment on its own in my opinion, and so many game trailers are just that. On the other hand, game trailers that are pure cinematic and feature no gameplay, just vibes and rendered cut scenes might look snazzy, well… Tycho of Penny Arcade coined a term for that nearly 20 years ago.
Also, honestly, there are so many games out there, it’s really hard to keep up. When Microsoft had its big game showcase back in June, there was so much content that it would have blown up people’s feeds. I think there were some really nice ones in there (Fable was one), but I’d need to work on a delayed posting system to meter them out at a consumable pace as to not drive folks away.
So yeah, that’s the short version. I’ll probably go into more detail in a future community posting. But please, keep the feedback and questions coming!
Thank you for the detailed answer! As you may know, I mod !movies@lemm.ee , and we were thinking to maybe stop posting trailers there but redirect here. The main issue is that it wouldn’t be a perfect replacement if people looking for movies and shows trailers find video games trailers too, hence my question.
Also, trailers are an easy way to get engagement, so getting rid of them might do a disservice to the community compared to !movies@lemmy.world for instance
That’s an interesting dilemma.
I do want to keep game trailers in-scope for this community’s content, but I don’t imagine that we’ll see a whole lot of them. Mostly triple-A titles that stand a fair chance of breaking containment from the gaming world and into wider cultural consciousness (Skyrim, the GTA series, Fallout, Elden Ring, Baulder’s Gate, etc), and perhaps some select intriguing or thought-provoking entries.
If !movies@lemm.ee is aiming to be a general purpose community for movie fans, it seems a bit odd to ask folks not to post trailers there. I feel like people are going to naturally do it, especially for the big blockbuster and award-seeking titles. Why not go with the flow? It wouldn’t hurt my feelings any. :)
My goal for this community is to cast a wide net, as wide as possible, to cover trailers applicable to an English language audience. That covers all the big Hollywood stuff, small indie works as well as international titles (with English subtitles as needed). That’s almost certainly more than a casual movie fan is interested in, but I’m partially doing this to help surface hidden treasures that people wouldn’t have otherwise known about (and hassle my local venues to book neat-looking stuff).
It would be great if you dropped a link into the !movies sidebar to this community for anybody interested in taking a sip from the firehose! :D